During the COVID-19 pandemic, I don’t miss so much getting out and about or the company of others because we are fortunate enough still to be working at our business. I love the companionship of working together, but I am mostly a solitary person and do my best contemplative work alone, in the quiet, without disruptions.

I don’t miss the restaurants or local pubs, although I love meeting friends there and the camaraderie we share. As I have aged, I have become very sensitive to loud noises, and a boisterous scene bothers me.

What I do miss are passenger jets overhead.

I am a lover of aviation, a former air traffic controller turned entrepreneur and writer. My eyes have been on the skies ever since I was a little boy watching blimps, out of Lake Hearst, N.J., from a surveyor’s transom left to me when my neighbor, Mr. Davis, died of cancer. A picture of the first Boeing 707 hung behind my bed as model planes circled on fishing line above.

During COVID-19, the skies have emptied of those beautiful machines that take us on exotic adventures, destinations to visit friends and relatives, and business trips. Not that I am a frequent flyer; I travel mostly back and forth to my “second home” in the Verde Valley of Arizona and also for a trip overseas every year or so.

Even after 15 years as a controller, I am fascinated by flight and especially with airlines. I remember parking at the end of the runway at Washington National Airport and spending hours watching the planes come down the Potomac and across the threshold, their wheels making contact to the runway with a chirp and a puff of burned rubber smoke.

I currently live in Stonington and have a rental property in Enfield. At my Enfield house, the planes used to fly overhead in an extended traffic pattern to land at Bradley Airport.

That is where my last assignment was as a controller.

I still have dreams, and often nightmares, about being a controller there who has “lost the picture.” Yes, lost control.

In Stonington, airliners descend overhead aimed at the Riverhead, N.Y., navigational aid and landing at JFK Airport. They come across the Atlantic up over Newfoundland, Bangor and the Cape from places like Heathrow, Madrid, Dubai and Amsterdam, starting their initial descent out of flight levels, an American Airlines Boeing 777, an Iberia Airbus 330, a British Airways Boeing-747-8, and the biggest, an Emirates Airbus 380, all filled with passengers heading home or for a visit to the United States.

I can amaze friends by pointing out a sliver of silver above us and guess which airline it is, the type and destination. They are just little specs overhead with a trace of sound lagging behind, but on my Pixel 3 phone there is an app called Air Traffic that tells me who they are, where they came from and their altitude and airspeed. Often, before I go to sleep, I hear the sound of jet engines throttling back for descent and pick up my phone to see who it is. I miss doing that. The skies seem empty now. They are barren even when I slide my finger across the screen and search over Manhattan, at JFK and LaGuardia, airspace that is normally filled with flocks of planes being vectored to land and taking off into the skies.

The terminals have been deserted too. How strange.

When I was flying back to Bradley on March 17 from Phoenix, which is usually teeming with passengers, it was oddly quiet. I was the fifth passenger in the TSA line, skycaps on electric passenger carts were begging people to get aboard, even Starbucks didn’t have much of a line.

All the terminals must feel eerie now; the intense energy, and excitement of millions of passengers, crew and staff have turned from swarms to a trickle.

PHX, DEN, ORD, JFK, LAX, DAL, ORL all ghost terminals. The skies are without the contrails and flying machines filled with people from all over the world, their adrenaline pumping, ready for take-off or for the final ready to land for a reunion with family, lover, business partner, or starting a well-deserved vacation.

Now, mighty planes parked on the tarmac away from the terminal gates are like energy, excitement and light in suspension begging to fly.

“...Southwest 433 is number one at the end of runway 33 tower. Southwest 433, runway 33 cleared for take-off. 433 on the roll... “

Yes, I miss the airplanes the most.

John Adams lives in Stonington.

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